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Pages That Weren’t Meant for Stages

THEATERGOING is both my profession and a passion, but I was a book-crazed kid and remain a book-loving adult. So you might think I’d be the target audience for the books-on-stage genre, a steady staple of today’s theater.

You’d be dead wrong. Nothing bores me more reliably, and sometimes more profoundly, than stage adaptations of celebrated novels. Offhand I can’t think of a single page-to-stage transfer that really thrilled me, that came close to equaling — or even approximating — the achievement of the book. More often than not these efforts come across as dehydrated-and-reconstituted Reader’s Digest versions of literature, denuded of the distinctive authorial voice and the imaginative scope that gave them their stature as memorable, sometimes even life-altering works of art. (I’m generally no fan of the “Masterpiece Theater” genre on film or television either, but movies and television probably do better justice to novels than theater does. The eye of the film director can more easily approximate the voice of an author because his or her control of the audience’s perspective is much tighter.)

This fall I’ve already seen five new examples of the genre, drawn from novels as disparate as Haruki Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore,” Charles Dickens’s “Tale of Two Cities,” Virginia Woolf’s “Waves” and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov.” Believe it or not, I’ve double-dipped in that Dostoyevsky doorstop, having seen Peter Brook’s theatrical adaptation of the “Grand Inquisitor” segment from “Brothers K” at New York Theater Workshop and a new version of the entire novel at the Lookingglass Theater in Chicago.

With the exception of Mr. Brook’s surprisingly spellbinding “Grand Inquisitor” — which is more a ritual staging of a moral essay than a dramatized chapter of the book — all of the novel-based productions I’ve seen this fall were unsatisfying, even those that attempted most inventively and most intelligently to create a fresh experience rather than simply cutting and pasting characters and plots from the books onto the stage.

The most ambitious, complex and fundamentally disappointing was the much-acclaimed multimedia transfiguration of the Woolf novel by Katie Mitchell, first seen at the National Theater in London and presented by Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series.

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Francis Guinan, left, and David Rhee in Kafka on the Shore.Credit
Michael Brosilow

My colleague Ben Brantley has written eloquently about the merits he found in Ms. Mitchell’s meticulously wrought adaptation of a novel that would seem to be unstageable. But as I watched Ms. Mitchell’s actors go through their elaborate paces — acting as Foley artists, videographers, actors, stage managers and narrators all at the same time — I couldn’t help thinking that I had never seen performers work so hard, with such choreographic precision and hair-trigger timing, to such meager aesthetic effect.

“The Waves” may be Woolf’s most ambitious evocation of the intricate workings of consciousness as it unfolds from moment to moment, from year to year, from the dreaming days of childhood to the darker passage of later life. It consists of the interior monologues of six British men and women at crucial junctures in their lives, divided by short, densely lyrical descriptions of the sun rising and setting over a house by the British shore where they all shared a defining moment in their youth. There is little action in the book, the singular exception being a dinner party at which all of the characters meet in young adulthood; “The Waves” is virtually all reflection.

The actors in Ms. Mitchell’s production, which recalls the work of the Wooster Group in its intricate mingling of sound and video into the theatrical experience, read selected passages from the novel. But they certainly do not lack for activity. With unflagging energy and speed they scuttle around the stage, grabbing props from shelves at the side, moving video cameras in and out of position, standing at the ready to create a sound effect at precisely the right moment to match an image. They essentially create in real time a movie (or at least a series of video images) that is projected on a screen at the back of the stage.

Their labors are impressive certainly, but they are also sorely distracting from the more necessary task of staying attuned to the reflections of the novel’s half-dozen characters, which gradually come to revolve around their relationship to a common friend, Percival. (“Is the novel this confusing?” my companion asked.) And rarely did any image seem to justify by its beauty, inventiveness or emotional weight the labor involved in manufacturing it before us live. (One, a shot of a love-struck schoolboy lasciviously devouring a banana as he stared longingly at the male object of his affection, was downright puerile.)

More crucially, Woolf’s novel is about the subjective — and fundamentally solitary — nature of life, the way our experience is shaped by the words we use to process it in the quiet chambers of our minds. If somebody asked you whether life most resembles a novel or a play, you might superficially answer that it resembles the theater — with our families and friends as characters, our careers and conflicts and relationships as the action. “The Waves” illuminates the idea that the essence of life is not experience itself but our responses to it, the unrecorded book we each write of our lives inside our minds. Putting the novel onstage seems to subvert this idea from the start.

“The Waves” presents particular challenges, but there are fundamental differences in our experiences of theater and literature that keep the odds stacked against any success in the enterprise of adapting literature to the stage. Reading is an inward, intimate experience, a quiet communion between one imagination and another. The reader is the author’s active collaborator. Words are just signifiers after all. The images and experiences they evoke are brought into being in the mind of the reader. Books happen inside us; theater happens to us. The difference may be subtle — both can of course move us in similar ways — but it is crucial. The theater is also a collaboration between audience and writer, but it is a communal one, mediated by directors, designers and actors. The singular vision of a novelist is likely to be diluted as it passes through several sets of hands. And the fiction writer does not have the constraints on the scope of his work that theater artists do. Nobody expects to read a novel in two hours, three tops.

Reduction is virtually a necessity in the process of adaptation, and the most common flaw in stage versions of novels is an emphasis on narrative at the expense of thought. Frank Galati, who directed the stage version of “Kafka on the Shore” at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, was undoubtedly seduced by the vivid strangeness of the story and the imagery in Mr. Murakami’s novel, with its talking cats and its cast of oddball archetypes, including Colonel Sanders and Johnnie Walker. (This is Mr. Galati’s second Murakami production, following “After the Quake.”)

But the dreamlike narrative of the novel, while it retained its color onstage, tended to shrink into a cartoonish silliness at the same time. Without the binding ingredient of Mr. Murakami’s prose to link together the experience of the novel’s two central characters — a boy named Kafka fleeing a dire prophecy and the cat-converser, survivor of a strange accident when he was a child in World War II — the events lose the haunting weight they carry in the book. With the shaping consciousness of the author surgically removed, the narrative felt arbitrary and at times impenetrable.

Woolf and Mr. Murakami are both modern (or postmodern) novelists, of course, and it might be supposed that the sturdier, more narrative-driven novels of the 19th century would provide stronger bones for a stage version. But Dostoyevsky, with his hallucinatory prose and dark intensity of thought, was even more ill-served by the Lookingglass production, adapted and directed by Heidi Stillman.

For despite Ms. Stillman’s honorable, lucid distillation of the novel’s action, the play felt like a telenovela twice translated, only with drearier clothing. The conflict between the father and son who love the same woman and the mystery of who murdered papa were stripped of the mystical and moral weight they carry in the book.

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Bruce Myers in The Grand Inquisitor.Credit
Tristram Kenton

This was not because Ms. Stillman excised the book’s ethical and theological arguments. They were duly included. But complex philosophical ideas have a way of shrinking into banalities when they are severely edited and spoken aloud. Language that we process comfortably when we encounter it in a book can easily seem leaden or unnatural when spoken on a stage.

The production certainly evoked the Russian experience in at least one respect. By the time its three and a half hours had concluded, I felt as if I’d been staggering across the steppes for a day or two and was ready for a revivifying shot of vodka.

In the segment of the “Grand Inquisitor” that he adapted, Mr. Brook understood that to tinker with the intricacy of Dostoyevsky’s philosophical argument would negate its effectiveness. A longtime master of stage minimalism, Mr. Brook recognized where the weight of Dostoyevsky’s parable story lies: in the eerie force of the words themselves and in the movement of the Grand Inquisitor’s argument as he challenges the figure of Jesus to justify the choices he made.

This was the least overtly theatrical of all the literary adaptations I saw this fall. There was no set to speak of, and no action. One of the two characters onstage never spoke a word. But in allowing the production to unfold in accord with the rhythms of the prose work it was drawn from, with no attempt to decorate it with visual or aural effects, Mr. Brook kept a tight hold on its power to move us to think and to feel.

You might conclude, of course, that simply to put onstage a reading of this passage from the novel, as Mr. Brook essentially has, would be superfluous. Why not just read it? But Mr. Brook surely understood too that the single action that concludes the story, the kiss Jesus bestows on the Grand Inquisitor, has a far greater impact onstage than it ever could on paper.

A kiss described, after all, is not the same thing as a kiss received.